DON HANK—It eventually dawned on me that this Russophobia to which I was exposed – and didn’t know its name yet – was only part of a bigger phenomenon that I call Westernness, which is in fact an infectious psycho-social disease, ie, primarily a way of thinking and functioning, one of whose symptoms is a general recalcitrant mediocrity and incompetence that in America has spread throughout academe, the professions, politics (in particular), the military, the think tanks, intelligence agencies, the media, Big Religion and the general populace. But it is also a sociopathy, making it invisible to the wide public.
GLOBALIZATION or CORPORATIZATION
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NATO headed for Nuclear war with Russia? Scott Ritter, Steve Starr, and Jose Vega with Diane Sare
by Diane Sare7 minutes readEDITOR—The panel discusses the colossal moral turpitude and imbecility of today’s leadership in the “collective West”, constantly starting wars and other acts of hostility against scores of nations that reject their imperialist rule, and why the populations subject to their criminal, undemocratic rule need to push for a new kind of political system assuring freedom and democracy instead of a fake democracy restricted to the super-rich elites. ONLY that can assure people all over the world a chance at surviving nuclear war and other catastrophes brought about by a decadent imperial system.
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—There is no need to wonder what causes this departure from observable facts, diabolically purposeful as it often is, and what comes of it. This may seem an unprecedented moment in human history, but there are, indeed, many precedents. Barbara Tuchman told us all about them in The March of Folly (Knopf, 1984): These grand lapses reflect an absence of intellect, vision, and principle at leadership level and lead ineluctably to failure and one or another kind of mess. The Ukraine case, the preoccupation in Munich last week, could not possibly make this clearer.
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MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, in order to maintain the system, you can’t have a rivalry to neoliberalism. There must be no alternative in the United States. Why is it fighting against China? China is an alternative. Russia is an alternative. If the world sees that the US and NATO, Europe are shrinking, and Eurasia is going way ahead, then there obviously is an alternative, and people are going to ask, what makes the Eurasian multipolar development so different from the world that the United States is trying to create, a neoliberal, financialized, privatized world ruling by force and by client military oligarchies?
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THE BROADER VIEW: How Finance Capitalism Ruined the World
7 minutes readEDITOR—Dr. Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. Dr. Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. A post-Keynesian, he criticizes neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. Our conversation examines the false dichotomy of capitalism v. socialism and considers the true dichotomy, which is industrial capitalism v. finance capitalism. Hudson and Keen argue that the transition to finance capitalism, where unearned income is considered economic growth, has truly sown the seeds to ruin the world. Tell us what you think in the comments!